Summergarden Julliard Concert II: New Music for String Quartet

The Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun was educated in Paris. While in his twenties, he returned to Turkey, where he held key cultural positions in the newly emergent republic. He conducted extensive research in Turkish folk music, working at times with Béla Bartok, and became an authority on folklore—an interest manifest in his compositions, which often blend romanticism, expressionism, and Turkish elements. Saygun dedicated his third string quartet, the last he completed, to his Hungarian wife.

Suzanne Farrin, the head of composition at SUNY Purchase, is also a regular host on Q2, the NYC-based radio station for new music. Her 2007 quartet Undecim (Latin for “eleven”) proposes that “in the long lifespans of stringed instruments . . . [they] remember all of the repertoire from the past and—like an active memory—the bow could temporarily take over the arm of the player and utter articulations of older pieces while the left hand stays in the present.” The work is in 10 sections—the 11th element is the unity of the work as a whole.

Sparrow’s Echo, by the composer and sound designer Mark Grey, draws its inspiration from Mary Doria Russell’s sci-fi novel The Sparrow. The book tells the story of an expedition in the near future to a planet from which radio broadcasts of music have been received—Earth’s first encounter with an alien civilization. In 2060, after 40 years of mysterious scientific, philosophic, and religious encounters on the faraway plant, the sole surviving member of the expedition, a messianic priest, returns to tell his tale.